Sir Richard Burton as Totemic Pantomime Demon in Postcolonial Theory

The present article examines the ways in which the travels and journeys in Arabia and other Muslim lands of Richard Francis Burton, the nineteenth-century explorer and writer have, since the influential work of EdwardW. Said on Orientalism, been somewhat undervalued by contemporaries. It aims to offer a re-evaluation of those works and their contribution to Victorian knowledge. It will also offer a challenge to Said’s account of Burton and, particularly in the second part, look at ways in which Burton has been viewed more generally by post-colonial theorists since Said’s influential work.

‘The Omnipresent Bania:’ Rural Moneylenders in Nineteenth-Century Sind

After revisiting Sind in 1876, Sir Richard Burton wrote, ‘The Hindu's reed-pen is a rod of iron and abjectly the unhappy Sindi trembles before it.’ By ‘Hindu,’ Burton meant the Hindu bania, the trader and moneylender, and by ‘Sindi’ he meant the Sindhi Muslim zamindar (landholder), the perennial debtor. The creditor tyrannized over the debtor, imposing ever harsher and more inequitable terms on him. What is interesting is that Burton scarcely appeared to recognize the Hindu banias as Sindhis at all; he wrote as if they were interlopers on the Sindhi scene. It was a colourful summary of the average British official's attitude towards debt. Twenty years later, Evan James, the Commissioner in Sind, quoted Burton's remark to lend support to his own argument that debt was an intolerable burden on Sindhi Muslims in general and the great zamindars in particular.